Healthcare entities such as hospitals, clinics, clinical groups, and/or device vendors (e.g., implants) often employ local information systems to store and manage patient information. If a first healthcare entity having a first local information system refers a patient to a second healthcare entity having a second local information system, personnel at the first healthcare entity typically manually retrieves patient information from the first information system and stores the patient information on a storage device such as a compact disk (CD). The personnel and/or the patient then transport the storage device to the second healthcare entity, which employs personnel to upload the patient information from the storage device onto the second information system.
Additionally, modern radiology involves normalized review of image sets, detection of possible lesions/abnormalities and production of new images. Current processing of images, however, is labor-intensive and slow. Consistency of review formats and analysis results is limited by operator availability, skills and variability. Further, a number of processing actions require access to expensive dedicated hardware, which is not easily or affordably obtained.